The media in Israel is abuzz with the news that Tzipi Livni will bring her Ha’Tnuah party into a joint ticket with the much larger Labor party. Now there is a tandem that can outpoll Likud, they are saying. The Israeli center just might be able to assert itself in this election.
Permit me to throw some cold water on this excitement. Livni, who has been the lone voice in the current government who has actively supported talks with the Palestinians, is doing this because if she doesn’t, there is a very strong possibility that her party will not get enough votes to remain in the Knesset. Labor leader Isaac Herzog, who has very little international experience, ran for the party leadership based on his commitment to resolving the long-standing conflict with the Palestinians. As the prospective Number Two, Livni gives Herzog some credibility in this regard.
But not only is there a long way to go before the March 17 election; there is also no guarantee that the party that wins the most seats will lead the next Israeli government. Of all people, Livni knows this only too well. In the 2009 election, she led the Kadima party which won the most seats in the Knesset. Then-President Shimon Peres tasked her with forming a governing coalition, but she couldn’t get enough parties to agree to join her to accumulate the requisite 61 seats. So Peres turned to Netanyahu who has occupied the Prime Minister’s office ever since.
Something very similar could happen in 2015. Although the current Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, is not at all fond of Netanyahu, he is also from the Likud party and, while his domestic policies are relatively liberal, he is no friend of the two-state solution. He might not necessarily want to give Netanyahu the first crack at forming a government, but, if he believes Bibi has the better chance of forming a governing coalition, he will bow to precedent.
And Rivlin may well be forced to that conclusion, whether he likes it or not. Even if Labor wins a seat or two more than Likud, it would likely win no more than 24 seats. Assuming Herzog and Livni could convince all of their potential allies to join a coalition (that would mean Yesh Atid, the new Kulanu party, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Meretz), they would get 40 more seats at most, but that, frankly, is a pretty optimistic projection. They very likely would need at least one other party to join them, but there is only one other realistic possibility: Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party. Lieberman would surely demand a plum cabinet position (probably Defense), who could then bring down the government any time he strongly disapproved of its policies.
Such a government would be exceedingly difficult to cobble together in any case. Lieberman’s party has always been sharply critical of the religious parties who would necessarily have to make up part of the Herzog-Livni coalition. The orthodox parties are themselves unpredictable and share mutual hostility not only with Yisrael Beiteinu but also with other secular parties like Yesh Atid. Meretz, the only left-wing Zionist party remaining these days, would also take some convincing, given the rightward tilt of the remaining members of the coalition.
Despite Livni and Herzog’s own positions, the government outlined above would also be somewhat less than passionate about a two-state solution. Kulanu, led by former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, is open to some evacuation of land but is unlikely to support a resolution based on the 1967 borders; Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas both theoretically support some kind of two-state solution but both also have a generally hawkish outlook. Together, they constitute nearly half the purported government. Less than a mandate for peace, especially considering that Likud and HaBayit HaYehudi in opposition would fiercely oppose any concessions — perhaps even discussions — with a Palestinian leadership they have repeatedly labelled “terrorist.”
So, an extremely unstable coalition government whose interest in reviving a peace process, let alone striking a deal, would be lukewarm at most is the best-case scenario, even with the news that Labor-plus-Livni might win a plurality in the Knesset.
That analysis presumes that the current polls reflect what will happen in March. Of course, they don’t. The campaign hasn’t even begun yet, and a Herzog-Livni ticket isn’t the most marketable for Israeli television. Israeli supporters of a two-state solution cling to Livni as a last, albeit highly flawed hope. They understand that, as a former prominent Likud member and from a family that was part of the aristocracy of Likud and its predecessors, she is not a peacemaker at heart. Herzog might be one but he is bland and thoroughly Ashkenazi (the most influential and wealthy of the Jewish ethnicities in Israel but no longer the majority). That image will work against him in the popular vote.
Israeli political campaigns are often a contest between preachers of hope and preachers of fear. In unsettled times like these, when Israelis are concerned about a growing number of unpredictable, even random, Palestinian attacks, as well as their growing sense of isolation from Europe, fear tends to do well. Historically, fear has served the Likud and other right-wing parties, especially HaBayit Hayehudi, very well.
There is a chance, albeit a very small one, that the preachers of hope can win. They’re not preaching a very high hope, merely one that is more hopeful than the demagoguery of Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett. And they have found an unexpected ally in Moshe Kahlon.
Kahlon, head of the new Kulanu (“All of Us”) party, appears to be drawing votes away from Likud, as well as from Yesh Atid. Like Livni, he is another of the former Likud pragmatists who do not identify with the extreme nationalist camp in Likud that has come to dominate that party after living for years on its far-right fringes.
It was Ariel Sharon who provoked the Likud split in order to thwart the party’s opposition to his plan to remove settlements from Gaza and a few from the West Bank as part of a larger strategic plan to pre-empt growing international pressure for a comprehensive solution. Others, like Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, went with him. Now Kahlon is following a similar path. While he says he could support some sort of land-for-peace arrangement, Kahlon, who is more focused on economic issues in any event, has never endorsed a two-state solution. Indeed, in the past he has rejected it as impractical.
The fact that Kahlon is now deemed a suitable partner for the dreamed-of Herzog-Livni government tells you a good deal of what you need to know about how such a government might behave. Nonetheless, Kulanu will appeal strongly to the Likud old guard. For those who supported former Likud ministers like Benny Begin and Dan Meridor — indeed, those who saw Benny’s father Menachem as the exemplar of Likud leadership and reject the fanatic ideologues who dominate the party today — Kahlon offers an alternative, as well as to other centrist voters who are disappointed in parties like Yesh Atid and Kadima before it.
With Kulanu taking some votes from Likud’s centrist flank and HaBayit HaYehudi continuing to gain right-wing votes at Likud’s expense, it is unsurprising that polls give Labor-with-Livni a chance to win the most seats. But does this mean Israel’s steady rightward drift has stopped?
Not necessarily. The overall view that the conflict with the Palestinians is unresolvable remains strong. At the same time, the growing split among Israeli Jews in reaction to the rise in ethnic and religious violence since last spring may prove an important factor in the election. While more Israeli Jews appear to embrace anti-Arab racism of the kind that benefits the far right represented by Bennett, more and more Jews are expressing alarm over that trend, although they, too, are loath to really examine the roots of that tension: the institutional racism and marginalization of Arabs in Israeli society.
Still, a considerable portion of Israeli society, including some religious and conservative sectors, want to see a reduction in tensions between Jews and Arabs. They are also concerned about the relationships between Israel and the U.S. and between Israel and Europe. While Bennett and his ilk think Israel should act even more defiantly toward the rest of the world, these actors are genuinely worried about the consequences of such an attitude. Many are also concerned about the country’s growing economic stratification.
Those forces of relative reason are confronting a growing wave of nationalist extremism in Israel. As a result, the most hopeful result of the election, at least at this point, is the creation of a center-right government. Of course, if the Herzog-Livni ticket would be willing to bring the non-Zionist, communist party, Hadash, and the Arab Ra’am Ta’al party into the government, along with Meretz, that would indeed change the political trajectory. But that is even less likely than a sudden and egalitarian Israeli decision to actually end the occupation. So, outside observers must for now cling to faint hope that things will go from incredibly bad to slightly less incredibly bad. Such is the state of Israeli politics.
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by Marsha B. Cohen
Reuven Rivlin has just been elected Israel’s 10th president. A member of Israel’s parliamentary body since 1988, he served as Speaker of the Knesset from 2003-06 and again from 2009-13. Today, Israel’s parliamentarians, by secret ballot, elected him to a 7-year term after two rounds of voting.
A native [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
Reuven Rivlin has just been elected Israel’s 10th president. A member of Israel’s parliamentary body since 1988, he served as Speaker of the Knesset from 2003-06 and again from 2009-13. Today, Israel’s parliamentarians, by secret ballot, elected him to a 7-year term after two rounds of voting.
A native born Israeli who speaks fluent Arabic, Rivlin (known as “Rubi” or “Ruvi”) comes from a family that claims 50,000 members worldwide, 35,000 of whom live in Israel. Rivlin’s father, Yosef Yoel Rivlin, was a scholar of Semitic languages who translated the Qur’an and One Thousand and One Nights into Hebrew. His cousin, Lilly Rivlin, who spent most of her life in the U.S., is a progressive writer and film maker. Her 2006 film, “Can You Hear Me?: Israeli and Palestinian Women Fight For Peace,” documented the joint activist efforts of Israeli and Palestinian women.
There are many paradoxes in the views of this right-wing Likudnik — hardly known outside of Israel — that explain why some of the most progressive Israelis respect him and believe he will be a suitable nonpartisan representative of the State of Israel in his largely ceremonial role as president.
1. Rivlin believes in democracy, free speech and political pluralism. He has vehemently opposed the witch hunts targeting progressive Israeli organizations, and resisted demands by right-wing politicians that the activities of left-leaning human rights groups in Israel be halted and outlawed. According to Dimi Reider of the progressive Israeli news site, +972:
As Speaker, Rivlin’s commitment to parliamentary democracy (and democracy in general) saw him turn time and again against his own party and its allies, stalling most of the anti-democratic legislation pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu, while at the same time trying to instruct his fellow right-wing legislators about the dangers of nationalist populism.
“Woe betide the Jewish democratic state that turns freedom of expression into a civil offense,” Rivlin wrote in an article slamming the Boycott Law passed by the Knesset in 2011. The legislation prohibited advocating any sort of boycott of Israeli products or institutions — economic, cultural, or educational — and made any person or entity proposing an Israel-related boycott subject to prosecution and liable for paying compensation, regardless of any actual loss or damage. Left-wing Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy praised Rivlin’s courageous stance, berating the reputedly “dovish” Shimon Peres who defeated Rivlin’s 2007 presidency bid:
Rivlin has been revealed as Israel’s honorary president; Peres, as its shameful one. The man from the right wing dared do what the man supposedly from the left did not. In the test of courage and honesty, the highest test of any elected official, Rivlin defeated Peres by a resounding knock-out.
(Earlier this year, in mid-February, Israel’s High Court considered a petition seeking to overturn the Boycott Law, but did not issue a ruling.)
2. Rivlin has consistently condemned the anti-Arab racism pervading Israeli society. He was incensed after learning that Arab construction workers on the Knesset grounds had red Xs painted on their protective helmets to distinguish them from foreign workers, and insisted on the immediate removal of the distinguishing marks. “We cannot allow the use of any markings that could be seen as a differentiation between people on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion,” he declared.
Rivlin has castigated the race-baiting and Islamophobia exhibited by supporters of the Beitar soccer team and the team’s discrimination against Muslim players. “Imagine the outcry if groups in England or Germany said that Jews could not play for them,” he said. He has also opposed proposals for the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem by radical Jewish settlers and condemned “price tag” attacks. In September 2013, Rivlin criticized the election slogan “Judaize Jerusalem” of the far-right United Jerusalem list, calling it a “disgrace” and “incitement,” and called for an investigation over whether the slogan constituted a criminal offense.
3. Rivlin opposes making civic and political rights for Israeli Arabs (or, as many prefer to be known, “Palestinian citizens of Israel”) contingent upon their serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). ”These calls are populist at best and carry a tone of incitement at worst,” he declared. At the same time, Rivlin endorsed civilian service projects that would help alleviate the high unemployment rate among young Arab men and improve the quality of life in their own communities. “I believe that the creation of a civil service layout within the Arab sector is a step that could benefit the Arab sector and the Israeli society at large. The Arab sector needs manpower and young volunteers can support that cause,” he said.
4. An unabashed proponent of the one state solution, Rivlin advocates giving full Israeli civil and political rights to West Bank Palestinians in a single-state scenario. Most Israeli liberals and hardliners alike oppose any one-state solution that would make Palestinians Israeli citizens. They complain that Rivlin’s stance would create a situation in which Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic. That’s because allowed to vote, Arabs would would eventually outnumber Jews and Israel could no longer be a “Jewish state.” To prevent this, most liberals still advocate a two-state solution, while right-wing hardliners want to expel as many Arabs as possible from the West Bank and Gaza while depriving those who remain of Israeli citizenship. Nevertheless, the notion that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may no longer be viable is gaining traction on Israel’s progressive left.
5. Rivlin has pledged to Arab citizens of “green line” Israel that they won’t be forced to become part of a Palestinian state in the event of a “land swap” deal that exchanges Israeli Arab cities and towns for Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank. In 2009, Rivlin infuriated Israeli hardliners when he made his first official visit as Knesset Speaker to the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, Israel’s second-largest Arab municipality in “green line” Israel. Rivlin assured the town’s residents they would not be subjected to “ethnic cleansing.”
6. Rivlin defended the rights of Arab Knesset members when parliamentarians from his own party and others were determined to take them away. In 2010, he joined prominent civil libertarians in objecting to Knesset Member (MK) Hanin Zouabi being stripped of her parliamentary privileges. As punishment for her involvement in the Gaza flotilla’s attempt to break the Israeli boycott of Gaza, MKs voted to strip her of her right to leave the country, take away her diplomatic passport, and deny her legal fee payments, refusing to allow Zouabi to say anything in her own defense. “Let her speak!” roared Rivlin at the shrieking MKs. Although disagreeing with Zouabi’s stance, Rivlin upheld her right to defend herself, stating, “I believe that everyone should have the right to speak their minds, even if what they say hurts me.” (In 2008, Rivlin had also opposed – and temporarily thwarted — taking away the pension of MK Azmi Bishara of the Arab Balad party, who fled Israel when he was charged with treason. Rivlin argued that until Bishara was convicted of a crime, his pension was untouchable.)
Before today’s election, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the hawkish, Russian-dominated Yisrael Beiteinu party, stated he would not support Rivlin because of his opposition to creating committees for investigating human rights organizations, and Rivlin’s defense of Arab parliamentarians’ rights.
7. Rivlin disapproves of Netanyahu’s ongoing criticism of the negotiations between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program. “We must not contradict the United States regarding the deal with Iran,” Rivlin wrote in a post to his Facebook page. “A conflict with the United States is against Israel’s vital interests.”
8. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did everything he could to prevent Rivlin’s election. After preventing the re-election of Rivlin as Knesset Speaker last year, Netanyahu tried to thwart Rivlin’s ascent to the presidency by frantically searching for a viable alternative candidate; proposing the outright abolition of the position of Israel’s president; and trying to postpone the presidential election. In a 2010 interview Rivlin had criticized Netanyahu’s leadership style:
“[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s worldview states that ‘the majority can do anything, that the leader can demand whatever he wishes of those who entered the Knesset because of him and he can force his opinion on them.’ That is something that can greatly harm democracy and lower the Knesset’s standing to rock bottom.”
9. Rivlin has attracted both respect and support from members of Israeli opposition parties. MK Ilan Gilon of the Meretz party declared he would be supporting Rivlin while other Meretz members took an anyone-but-Rivlin stance. Even before the withdrawal of long-time Labor party stalwart Benjamin Eliezer from the presidential race due to financial impropriety investigations, Labor MK Shelley Yachimovich announced she would be crossing party lines to vote for Rivlin because he was “the most appropriate and suitable candidate for the position.” Her words of praise did not stop there:
He is an exemplary democrat, honest and uncorrupted, modest in his personal manner and statesman-like in his conceptions and public conduct. One doesn’t have to speculate on how he will behave as president. Even as someone from the right-wing, whose opinions are often the opposite of mine, he passed the test, standing like a solid rock in defense of democracy.”
Photo Credit: J-Street.
]]>by Marsha B. Cohen
The New York Times’ op-ed page headlined “Hopes for Iran”, which offers half a dozen cautious to negative views on Iran’s president-elect Hassan Rouhani, unexpectedly links to a “Related Story” published last year: Should Israel Accept a Nuclear Ban? Linking the online discussion — intentionally or not [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
The New York Times’ op-ed page headlined “Hopes for Iran”, which offers half a dozen cautious to negative views on Iran’s president-elect Hassan Rouhani, unexpectedly links to a “Related Story” published last year: Should Israel Accept a Nuclear Ban? Linking the online discussion — intentionally or not — to a debate over Israel’s own nuclear program and policies may be more remarkable than any of the op-eds’ arguments.
One of the most overlooked and under-discussed aspects of the Iranian nuclear program, at least from an Iranian point of view, is the double standard that’s applied to it: while Israel has an estimated 100-200 nuclear weapons that it has concealed for decades, Iran is treated like the nuclear threat — and Iran doesn’t possess a single nuclear weapon. Adding insult to injury, Israel is usually the first, loudest and shrillest voice condemning Iran and demanding “crippling sanctions” while deflecting attention away from its own record.
“Iran has consistently used the West’s willingness to engage as a delaying tactic, a smoke screen behind which Iran’s nuclear program has continued undeterred and, in many cases, undetected,” complained former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold (also president of the hawkish Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) in a 2009 LA Times op-ed entitled “Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations Threaten the World“:
Back in 2005, Hassan Rowhani, the former chief nuclear negotiator of Iran during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, made a stunning confession in an internal briefing in Tehran, just as he was leaving his post. He explained that in the period during which he sat across from European negotiators discussing Iran’s uranium enrichment ambitions, Tehran quietly managed to complete the critical second stage of uranium fuel production: its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan. He boasted that the day Iran started its negotiations in 2003 “there was no such thing as the Isfahan project.” Now, he said, it was complete.
Yet half a century ago, Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense, Shimon Peres — the political architect of Israel’s nuclear weapons program — looked President John F. Kennedy in the eye and solemnly intoned what would become Israel’s “catechism”, according to Avner Cohen: “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.” Fifty years and at least 100 nuclear weapons later, Peres is awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom, with no mention of his misrepresentation of Israel’s nuclear progress.
According to declassified documents, Yitzhak Rabin, another future Israeli prime minister (who would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994) also invoked the nuclear catechism to nuclear negotiator Paul Warnke in 1968, arguing that no product could be considered a deployable nuclear weapons-system unless it had been tested (Israel, of course, had not tested a nuclear weapon). Warnke was unswayed by Rabin’s talmudic logic but came away convinced that pressuring Israel would be futile since it was already a nuclear weapons state.
In a BBC Radio June 14 debate between Gold and former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw about the prospects for improving relations with Iran after Rouhani’s election, Straw pointed out that Israel has a “very extensive nuclear weapons program, and along with India and Pakistan are the three countries in the world, plus North Korea more recently, which have refused any kind of international supervision…”:
JOHN HUMPHRYS (Host): Well let me put that to Dr Gold; you can’t argue with that, Dr Gold?
DORE GOLD: Well, we can have a whole debate on Israel in a separate program.
JOHN HUMPHRYS: Well, it’s entirely relevant isn’t it? The fact is you’re saying they want nuclear weapons; the fact is you have nuclear weapons.
DORE GOLD: Look, Israel has made statements in the past. Israeli ambassadors to the UN like myself have said that Israel won’t be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.
JACK STRAW: You’ve got nuclear weapons.
JOHN HUMPHRYS: You’ve got them.
JACK STRAW: You’ve got them. Everyone knows that.
DORE GOLD: We have a very clear stand, but we’re not the issue.
JACK STRAW: No, no, come on, you have nuclear weapons, let’s be clear about this.
National security expert Bruce Riedel is among those who have observed Washington’s “double standard when it comes to Israel’s bomb: the NPT applies to all but Israel. Indeed, every Israeli prime minister since David Ben-Gurion has deliberately taken an evasive posture on the issue because they do not want to admit what everyone knows.” Three years ago, Riedel suggested that the era of Israeli ambiguity about its nuclear program “may be coming to an end, raising fundamental questions about Israel’s strategic situation in the region.” Thus far that hasn’t happened. Instead, Israeli leaders and the pro-Israel lobby use every opportunity (including Peres’ Medal of Freedom acceptance speech) to deflect attention from Israel’s defiant prevarication about its own nuclear status and directing it toward Iran.
This past April, Anthony Cordesman authored a paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) arguing that Israel posed more of an existential threat to Iran than the other way around. “It seems likely that Israel can already deliver an ‘existential’ nuclear strike on Iran, and will have far more capability to damage Iran than Iran is likely to have against Israel for the next decade,” Cordesman wrote. (The paper has since been removed from the CSIS website, but references to it persist in numerous articles.)
This double standard, and refusal to recognize Iranian security concerns, is not news to Iranians. Ali Larijani, Speaker of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament), assured the Financial Times last September that talks between the U.S. and Iran “can be successful and help create more security in the region. But if they try to dissuade Iran from its rights to have peaceful nuclear technology, then they will not go anywhere — before or after the US elections.” Larijani, who was Iran’s nuclear negotiator between 2005-2007, proposed that declarations by U.S. political leaders that Iran has a right to “peaceful nuclear technology” be committed to in writing.
“Many times the US president or secretary of state have said they recognise Iran’s right to nuclear energy,” Larjani said. “So, if [they] accept this, write it down and then we use it as a basis to push forward the talks…What they say during the talks is different from what they say outside the talks. This is a problem.” Larijani also denied that Iranian leaders were discussing withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) even though the benefits of Iran remaining a signatory — in the face of mounting international pressure campaigned for by Israel while Israel itself faced little to no criticism — seemed unclear. “The Israelis did not join the NPT and they do not recognize the IAEA,” he said. “They are doing what they want — producing nuclear bombs, and no one questions it.”
This past weekend, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour bluntly suggested that up until now, the U.S. has offered Iran few incentives to comply with the international community’s demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. I’ve spoken to Iranian officials, former negotiators, actually people who worked for Dr. Rouhani earlier, and they said that so far the American incentives to Iran in these nuclear negotiations amounts to demanding diamonds for peanuts.”
Ben Caspit, writing in al-Monitor last week week, notes that as soon as the Russians hinted Iran would be willing to suspend uranium enrichment and keep it at the 20% level, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blew off the suggestion as merely cosmetic. The Israeli demand will continue to be uncompromising, Caspit says, insistent that “…nothing short of complete cessation of uranium enrichment, removal of all enriched uranium out of Iran; termination of nuclear facility activities and welcoming the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would provide sufficient guarantee of Iran’s willingness to abandon the nuclear program. Needless to say this will never happen.”
As Jim Lobe pointed out the other day, Rouhani outlined an 8-point blueprint for resolving the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Iran in a letter to TIME in 2006. Rouhani stated:
]]>In my personal judgment, a negotiated solution can be found in the context of the following steps, if and when creatively intertwined and negotiated in good faith by concerned officials…Iran is prepared to work with the IAEA and all states concerned about promoting confidence in its fuel cycle program. But Iran cannot be expected to give in to United States’ bullying and non-proliferation double standards.
by Marsha B. Cohen
For most Israeli politicians, the news of the election of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran, is not good. That it is considered good news by anyone else makes it that much worse.
In Poland last Wednesday, two days before Iranians went to [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
For most Israeli politicians, the news of the election of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran, is not good. That it is considered good news by anyone else makes it that much worse.
In Poland last Wednesday, two days before Iranians went to the polls, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that the results would bring about no meaningful change in Iran. Hours before reports of the election’s outcome began to be announced, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank, that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, would decide who the next Iranian president would be. The imminent Iranian election would change nothing.
As news of Rouhani’s garnering more than half the votes cast in Iran began to emerge, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, echoed the widespread view that it is Khamenei who makes all the decisions concerning the Iranian nuclear program, not the Iranian president. “After the elections, Iran will continue to be judged by its actions, in the nuclear sphere as well as on the issue of terror,” Palmor said in a statement.” Iran must abide by the demands of the international community to stop its nuclear program and cease the dissemination of terror throughout the world.”
In a cabinet meeting on Sunday morning, Netanyahu derided not only the possible impact of a Rouhani-presidency on Iran’s policies, but also whether Rouhani even deserved to be considered a moderate since Khamenei had allowed him to run:
“Let us not delude ourselves,” Netanyahu said. “The international community must not become caught up in wishes and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program. It must be remembered that the Iranian ruler, at the outset, disqualified candidates who did not fit his extremist outlook and from among those whose candidacies he allowed was elected the candidate who was seen as less identified with the regime, who still defines the State of Israel [in an address last year] as ‘the great Zionist Satan.’”
Referring to the unexpected election of Mohammed Khatami as Iran’s president in 1997, the Israeli Prime Minister reminded his cabinet that “Fifteen years ago, the election of another president, also considered a moderate by the West, led to no change in these aggressive policies.”
Perhaps Netanyahu should be reminded that in 1992, he claimed Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon. That same year, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (Israel’s current president) told French TV that Iran would have a nuclear warhead by 1999. This contention, shared by Netanyahu’s political rival, Yitzhak Rabin and echoed here by the Israel lobby, provided much of the impetus to push harder for the anti-Iran sanctions that were a major factor in constraining the ability of the last reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, to improve the economy and gain political capital against regime hard-liners.
In an interview with AP and Reuters, Peres made the opposite argument, praising the election results as a blow to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “who was sure that the people would vote according to his decision.” According to Peres, Rouhani will now have to be judged by his actions, rather than his words.
(Now what would happen if the U.S. were to judge Israeli leaders by their actions rather than their words, with regard to resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict or coming clean about Israel’s nuclear weapons program?)
Knesset Foreign Relations Chair Avigdor Lieberman of the hardline Israel is Our Home party, barred from assuming the post of Foreign Minister until the pending corruption charges against him are resolved, sized up Iran’s president-elect as being “not more moderate, but more sophisticated” than his predecessor. “We have not heard from [Rouhani] any announcements that he plans to stop the nuclear program.”
Minister of International Relations Yuval Steinitz, whose ministerial duties include “Israel’s intelligence efforts on Iran,” told Army Radio on Sunday morning that “the results are a credit to the Iranian people,” but expressed doubts as to whether Supreme Leader Khamenei, who “actually manages foreign affairs, national security and Iran’s nuclear program,” would alter Iran’s “path and behavior.” Steinitz asserted that the election results would have no effect on Iran’s nuclear progress, which he claimed is ever-closer to crossing the nuclear “red line.” Were any changes in to occur, he opined they would come about solely as a consequence of “increased pressure” by the international community. Steinitz therefore insisted that international sanctions against Iran “must continue, regardless of the desire of the Iranian people for progress.”
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni – praised by J-Street last year when she resigned from the Knesset for defining “the ideal of public service in Israel, pursuing her vision of the best interests of Israel with passion, dignity and integrity,” but who immediately jockeyed for and won a cabinet position in the right-wing Netanyahu government elected in January — also told Army Radio that Rouhani’s election would test the West’s determination to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. While Rouhani might seem like a more moderate face for Iranians, Livni was in agreement with her Likud colleagues that it would be “wise” to continue pressuring Iran. “The test will be that of action,” Livni said, parroting the official Israel position that Iran’s new president should be judged by actions instead of words.
MK Zahava Gal-on of Israel’s pro-peace and progressive Meretz party, which is in opposition to Netanyahu’s government, issued a sardonic statement of condolence to Israel’s political leadership on the departure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who for the past eight years has provided a treasure trove of anti-Israel invective that Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have been able to quote when making their case that Iran is an imminent threat to Israel:
I extend my sympathy to the Israeli government that, with heavy heart and head hung low, must bid farewell to Ahmadinejad, who served as propaganda card and as an excellent source of excuses to avoid dealing with Israel’s real problems,” she said in a statement.
Where will the prime minister turn to now, when someone asks him about the Palestinian conflict? What about the out-of-control budget deficit for which he was responsible?… What about the racism that exists within Israeli society?… What will he do?”
I fear that the election of the moderate Rouhani is not just a blow to the extremists in Tehran, but also to the extremist leadership in Israel, which will now have to replace intimidation with actions.”
Gal-On’s sarcasm is closer to reality than it might sound. After Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the contentious 2009 runoff presidential election, despite charges that his opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, had received more votes, the pro-settler, nationalist news site Arutz Sheva included some quotes reflecting the attitudes of many Israeli politicians and pundits about the 2009 victory of the outgoing Iranian president who Israeli leaders have delighted in comparing to Haman and Hitler, among them:
- Mossad director Meir Dagan told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “if the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat.”
- Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan University, explained to CBS News, “If we have Ahmadinejad, we know where we stand. If we have Mousavi we have a serpent with a nice image.”
- Political commentator Ron Ben Yishai declared Ahmadinejad “a diplomatic asset for the West in general and for Israel in particular. His Shi’ite fanaticism and Holocaust denial have frightened Arab and Western countries and assisted in creation of a global anti-Iranian front.”
So it’s not surprising that, as the results of the 2013 Iranian election became known on Saturday, Deputy Defense Minister Gilad Erdan expressed concern that Rouhani’s reputation as a centrist and the support he received from Iran’s reformists might tempt the West to give Iran “more leeway in diplomatic contacts over its rogue nuclear drive,” agreeing to more talks, and then more talks.
Regardless of the outcome of any Iranian election offering the possibility of change — admittedly not the prospect or an outright promise — Israeli politicos will be displeased, and for the wrong reasons. Expect to hear more from them in the days and weeks ahead in the media, and from the Israel Lobby in the United States.
]]>While Secretary of State John Kerry was in Israel declaring his aim to “exhaust all the possibilities of peace” to try to stop wasting the Obama Administration’s time and energy on the futile effort to find a resolution to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, Congress was illustrating once again [...]]]>
While Secretary of State John Kerry was in Israel declaring his aim to “exhaust all the possibilities of peace” to try to stop wasting the Obama Administration’s time and energy on the futile effort to find a resolution to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, Congress was illustrating once again why the United States cannot play a constructive role in this conflict.
Congressional activity this month has been largely focused on Iran and, to a lesser degree, Syria. But a few events demonstrated that, despite President Barack Obama’s lofty goals and rhetoric about peace, Congress has continued its long-term, bi-partisan shift to the right on this issue. Interestingly, one of the most illustrative examples was actually a bill in support of peace and a two-state solution to the conflict.
That bill, H.Res.238, titled “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding United States efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace,” was brought by California Democrat Barbara Lee, one of the most ardent pro-peace voices in Congress. The bill is mostly unremarkable; it does nothing more than re-state what is, ostensibly, long-standing US policy. Yet, if anyone was paying any attention to the bill, they would notice that one of the provisions “calls on the Israeli Government to cease support for and to prevent further settlement expansion in the Occupied Territories.”
This is, of course, official US policy, but in practice, it is opposed by most of Congress and the Israel Lobby. Obama found out how difficult it can be to pursue US interests and enforce official US policy early in his first term when he attempted to get Israel to comply with this very idea.
The bulk of Lee’s bill, both in the preamble and the eleven “resolved” clauses, is an unequivocal praise of US peace efforts, from Ronald Reagan through Obama, and an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. Yet the bill has only four co-sponsors and was immediately referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where it will quite certainly die. It is telling that on the same day Lee introduced this bill, she put out two press releases, neither of which mentions H.Res.238.
While Lee has to find a way to bulk up her pro-peace credentials quietly, so she won’t incur the wrath of AIPAC (which, despite Lee representing the very liberal areas of Berkeley and Oakland, California, is very strong in her district), those who oppose any sort of resolution of this conflict operate openly and proudly. The so-called “Israel Allies Foundation,” an ultra-right wing group which opposes any sharing of Jerusalem, will celebrate the anniversary of the Israeli occupation with an event in the Rayburn House office building of the House of Representatives. According to their announcement, the event will include speeches from Congress members while “Jewish and Christian leaders” gather with their assembled flock to pray.
As Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now explains, “IAF was ‘pioneered’ by far right-wing Israeli former MK Benny Elon, a longtime opponent of the two-state solution, a strong supporter of the settlement movement, a devotee of the “Jordan is Palestine” approach, and an advocate of “transfer” of Palestinians. Elon has authored his own “peace plan” whose first point is: “Government Decision: Declaring the Palestinian Autorithy [sic] an enemy.” He and his views have long received a warm welcome from some on Capitol Hill, including as recently as February of this year.”
It is telling that, as Kerry was preparing for his latest excursion to Israel, Congress was very quiet about Israel-Palestine peace. Aside from Lee’s meaningless bill, there was hardly a peep on Capitol Hill about Kerry’s trip. Meanwhile, the Israeli cabinet was debating whether or not the two-state solution is even Israel’s position in the first place.
The situation has grown so dire that J Street, the self-proclaimed “pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby”, issued an alert to its members asking them to demand that Israel “affirm the Israeli government’s commitment to two states for two peoples.” According to their alert, “For there to be any hope of progress, the Israeli government must state unequivocally that support for a two-state solution is a core principle of its foreign policy – as it has been under every Prime Minister since Yitzhak Rabin.”
This is, however, a patent falsehood. Rabin’s position was never a two-state solution. He initiated the Oslo process, but the endgame was, quite intentionally, never defined before his death. Nor did his successor, Shimon Peres, ever affirm support for a two-state solution while in office. The next Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ran for office on an explicitly anti-Oslo platform, and his party, the Likud Coalition, to this day expresses absolute opposition to a Palestinian state as part of its platform. Ehud Barak proposed a two-state solution of sorts, though its terms were clearly never going to be acceptable to the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon removed Israel’s settlements from Gaza, and his closest advisor, Dov Weisglass, said that the purpose of that withdrawal was to freeze the peace process, a statement Sharon never repudiated. And, while Ehud Olmert seemed to support a two-state solution, when the Palestinians offered almost total capitulation on issues of territory, Jerusalem and refugees, his government still rejected it.
J Street is understandably grasping at straws. Without the Oslo framework of a two-state solution, it has no reason to exist, and is very likely to wither and die. It is therefore desperate to maintain the illusion that the peace process as it has existed for the past twenty years is still alive, even though it is clear to any rational observer that it’s not.
Kerry’s current blitz, whether intentional or not, is going to be the final nail in the coffin. As the entire question of Palestine slips behind an Iranian and Syrian curtain for the summer, it will take a dramatic action to bring attention back to it. But that action will not come from John Kerry or Barack Obama. It might come from an Israeli government that could feel emboldened by the lack of attention on the Palestinian Territories to take the sort of actions that Naftali Bennett, who has called for annexation by Israel of 60% of the West Bank, would recommend. It could come from the Palestinians, if they finally choose to face reality and acknowledge that the United States is incapable, due to its “unshakeable bond” with Israel and the enormous influence of the Israel Lobby, of ever pressuring Israel into even the minimal concessions needed to start talks again, let alone bring them to a conclusion.
Or it could happen because this situation, in all its hopelessness and cynicism, finally erupts into sustained violence again. But whatever the outcome turns out to be, we can be sure that in the near term, the issue will move to the back burner. In the long-term, whenever it emerges, the playing field will no longer reflect acceptance of the Oslo process and its endless negotiations to nowhere.
]]>by Marsha B. Cohen
US President Barack Obama has arrived in Israel.
Greeted by Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu (who wore a blue tie that almost exactly matched Obama’s), the US president was quickly ushered to view an Iron Dome battery set up at the airport. [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
US President Barack Obama has arrived in Israel.
Greeted by Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu (who wore a blue tie that almost exactly matched Obama’s), the US president was quickly ushered to view an Iron Dome battery set up at the airport. When asked by a security coordinator to follow a red line leading from the tarmac to view an on-site video about how the anti-rocket system works, Obama reportedly quipped, “Bibi always tells me about red lines.” During a photo with the Iron Dome crew — its development generously funded by the US – Obama said, “All of you are doing an outstanding job. We’re very proud of you.”
For those wanting to follow Obama’s trip, tweets by veteran Israeli journalist Chemi Shalev are faster, much more informative — and a lot more fun — than the official media coverage. The international press corps of 500 is meanwhile awaiting even the hint of script-deviation like starving feral felines. As one Shalev tweet put it, “On both Israeli and US networks, Obama critics out in force to make sure he doesn’t leave too good an impression.”
One way to do this is by framing Obama’s trip to Israel as a sincere, half-hearted or futile attempt to make amends for appearing to have slighted or offended Israelis for not visiting sooner. Few could guess that Obama is only the fifth of the twelve sitting US presidents since 1948 — the year Israel was recognized by the United Nations as a state — to visit Israel while in office, as the Jerusalem Post points out. Richard Nixon dropped by in June 1974, a mere 55 days before his resignation from the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Jimmy Carter came to promote the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. For his trouble, Carter became the least popular and most reviled American president among Israelis, while Nixon — for reasons that would seem bizarre to most Americans — is recalled fondly. Bill Clinton made three trips to Israel during his first term and one during his second. George W. Bush, on the other hand, waited until he was practically out of office to make two visits in 2008.
Beyond providing fodder for Fox News (which is polling its viewers as to whether or not Obama’s lighthearted comment “It’s good to get away from Congress!” was, in Steve Doocy’s words, a gaffe or a laugh), today’s itinerary has mainly involved photo ops and platitudes. Obama’s arrival speech affirmed that the Israel-US relationship is not only strong, it’s unshakeable, and that’s because it’s based upon “shared democratic values” and the mutual desire for peace and justice in the world. This sentiment will doubtlessly be the dominant theme in the president’s speech at the International Convention Center.
The itinerary for the second and third days of Obama’s Israel trip has been carefully crafted by his Israeli hosts in consultation with “American Jewish leaders”, designed to affirm the national narrative of the Jewish state at the most sacred shrines of Israel’s civil religion, defined by Myron J. Aronoff as “a special type of dominant ideological superstructure which is rooted in religion and which incorporates significant elements of religious symbol, myth and ritual that are used selectively.” The Iron Dome system is not merely a high-tech device resembling a tilted crate that can intercept incoming rockets. Its component for intercepting larger missiles, referred to as the “Magic Wand,” is known in Israel as “David’s sling.” According to its civil religion, Israel — the fifth or sixth largest arms dealer in the world and the recipient of 60% of all US foreign military assistance — views itself as the young shepherd boy David, deftly wielding his slingshot against the Philistine giant Goliath. Iron Dome (kipat barzel in Hebrew–literally “iron skullcap”) fuses myths of the biblical past with the high-tech present.
On the second day of his visit, Obama will tour the Israel Museum, guardian of the evidence upon which Israel’s eternal and inalienable right to the strategic sliver of territory between the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas is predicated. Never mind that it has changed hands dozens of times during the past 5,000 years, belonging for centuries at a time to various empires: Egyptian; Assyrian; Babylonian; Persian; Greco-Macedonian; Roman; Byzantine; Arab and Turkish. Three to four thousand years ago, the aboriginal Canaanite population was colonized by Arameans and Hyksos, Phoenicians and Philistines. But according to the Israel Museum, in the past, present and future there is only one people that matters — those whose mythic claim to the land is unequivocally affirmed by the texts that are protected within the innermost sanctum of the Shrine of the Book.
At that same museum Obama will be shown a 50:1 scale model reconstruction of the “Second Temple Jerusalem,” a first century Roman city whose construction began during the reign of Herod. The construction of the Temple itself was completed in 53 CE, five decades after Herod’s death and only seven years before its destruction by Roman legions in the wake of a violent civil war among Jewish factions who were fighting one another within the supposedly sacred precinct. Finally, it’s anticipated that Obama will view an exhibit of Israel’s successes as an ultramodern powerhouse at the forefront of scientific achievement.
Obama will also meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. Allowing Abbas to meet with Obama anywhere within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem — which have tripled since the initial “reunification” of the city in 1967 — might constitute an admission that Palestinians have a claim to Jerusalem, and that cannot be allowed. The distance between Ramallah and the northernmost “neighborhoods” within the boundaries of “united Jerusalem” is just a few miles.
On his last day in Jerusalem, Obama will lay wreaths in memory of Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem and at the the grave of the “father of political Zionism,” Theodor Herzl. Obama will also lay a wreath at the gravestone of former Labor party Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin was murdered in 1995 by Yigal Amir, a religious Jewish nationalist. Sentenced to life in prison plus six years, Amir was allowed to marry, and after a failed attempt to smuggle out his sperm in order to impregnate his bride, was granted conjugal visits. A circumcision ceremony for his son was held at the prison on the anniversary (according to the secular calendar) of Rabin’s assassination. No longer in solitary confinement, Amir is a popular figure among members of the Israeli right, which have been urging for several years that Amir be released from prison.
To the sounds of these clanging and clashing symbols, Barack Obama becomes the fifth sitting US president to visit Israel.
Photo: President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel talk before their bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, March 5, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
]]>Ehud Barak is retiring from Israeli politics in 2013, after two decades. Or so he says.
A career officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) before entering politics, Barak’s first mention in the US press appears to have been on May 22, 1993, when the New York Times‘ Clyde [...]]]>
Ehud Barak is retiring from Israeli politics in 2013, after two decades. Or so he says.
A career officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) before entering politics, Barak’s first mention in the US press appears to have been on May 22, 1993, when the New York Times‘ Clyde Haberman noted, “Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, army chief of staff during the 1967 war, relies heavily on the military and political advice of the current chief, Lieut. Gen. Ehud Barak”. Although still IDF Chief of Staff at the time, he was “reportedly being groomed by Mr. Rabin for future Labor Party leadership.”
Born in 1942, Barak was part of a new wave of native born military retirees who entered Israeli politics in the 1990s, finally replacing Israel’s pre-state gerontocracy on both the left and the right. (That gerontocracy persists in the person of 89-year-old President Shimon Peres, whose 66-year political career has spanned 11 US presidencies from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barak Obama.) When Barak retired from the IDF, Rabin named him to the cabinet post of Interior Minister. Even then Barak was cultivating American contacts. According to Haberman, when Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited Israel in February, General Barak was on hand almost everywhere the American went.” Apparently Barak cultivated close ties with Leon Panetta, President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff. Now Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration, Panetta responded to the announcement of Barak’s intended departure from Israel’s political scene by presenting Barak with the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service.
When Barak retired from the IDF, Rabin named him to the cabinet post of Interior Minister. After Rabin’s assassination on Nov. 4, 1995, Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres gave Barak the post of Foreign Minister, which Peres himself had held under Rabin. Barak was elected a Labor Party member of Israel’s Knesset in 1996, where he served as a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. That same year, in Israel’s first direct (non-parliamentary) election for Prime Minister, Peres lost the premiership to Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak subsequently replaced Peres as leader of the Labor Party.
Barak defeated Netanyahu in the 1999 election. In 2000 he ended Israel’s 17 year occupation of southern Lebanon, ordering the overnight withdrawal of all IDF troops, a controversial decision considered long overdue by some Israelis, criticized as too hasty by others. Marketing himself as a peacemaker in Yitzhak Rabin’s image, Barak curried American favor by meeting with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under Clinton’s mediating auspices in 2000 at Camp David. The talks ended in failure. Barak’s stated efforts to reach a peace agreement between Israel and Syria also failed.
After Ariel Sharon’s ceremonious and provocative visit to the Temple Mount with half a dozen members of the Likud opposition in September 2000 precipitated Palestinian outrage that turned violent (now known as the Second Intifada), Barak was forced to call for new elections. As attacks on Israeli civilians became more widespread, Labor was trounced by Likud, making Sharon Prime Minister in Barak’s stead.
Barak spent six years in “the private sector,” rebranding himself as a businessman involved in various energy and security projects, but nonetheless plotting his return to politics. He advocated military action by the US to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein from power. “President Bush’s policy of ousting Saddam Hussein creates an extraordinary standard of strategic and moral clarity,” he wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. None too pleased with “the in-depth, genuine — and so typically American — public debate that is developing before our eyes about Iraq” that might “dilute this clarity” Barak even laid out the necessary military strategy for Bush: “a surgical operation to hit the core of the regime,” and, just in case that didn’t finish the job, a ready-to go “a full-scale operation to include major airborne and ground forces, perhaps 300,000 soldiers.”
Barak returned to politics in 2005, after four years in “the private sector” a/k/a Ehud Barak Ltd. After Ehud Olmert became acting Prime Minister when Sharon went into a coma following a stroke in early 2006, Barak joined Olmert’s cabinet, becoming Minister of Defense. Barak strategized and oversaw the three week IDF operation to counter rocket fire from the Gaza Strip known as “Operation Cast Lead.” Although many Israelis at the time considered Cast Lead to have been justified, necessary, and well executed, outside the country, Israel was criticized for what was seen as excessive and disproportionate use of force inside the densely populated Gaza Strip.
After polls revealed his personal unpopularity with voters, Barak did not seek leadership of the Labor party leader in 2005, but he regained control of the party in June 2007. Deborah Sontag of the New York Times described Barak as “a kind of hawkish dove” who “casts himself in the image of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schroder — as the leader of a political movement that is finding its way from left to center.”
But the inglorious outcome of the 2009 election, necessitated by Ehud Olmert’s downfall amid accusations of corruption, reduced the Labor party — once proud political standard-bearer of the statism of Israel’s founders — to a puny party that placed fourth in the election. Barak was blamed for the loss, and he was increasingly regarded as an opportunist and political chameleon, particularly when he joined Netanyah’s Likud-led government in exchange for the keeping the defense portfolio
Facing the increasing unlikelihood that he will hold onto the post of Defense Minister in the next Netanyahu government — widely regarded as a shoo-in when Israeli elections take place in January 2013 — and lacking the personal popularity that might someday make him Prime Minister again, Barak seems to have chosen to give up on Israeli politics altogether.
Barak’s political obituaries in the Israeli media are mostly muted by dislike for him as a person and a politician. But he wins points from some Israeli journalists for his military acumen. Yoel Marcus writes in Haaretz:
His record as defense minister is excellent – even his rivals admit that, though they add it’s a shame he’s not a mensch. His loyal aides when he was prime minister left angry and bitter. His secretaries dubbed him “Napo,” short for Napoleon. As prime minister he failed, but as a strategist and leader he was considered a genius, even abroad.
During his not quite four years in Netanyahu’s government, Barak has been sending mixed signals on his views of Iran’s nuclear program and how Israel should deal with it. In November 2011, as my Lobe Log colleague Jasmin Ramsey reported, Barak told Charlie Rose that if he were Iran, he would “probably want nuclear weapons.” But this recent Haaretz editorial argues that “Netanyahu considered Barak a close adviser and partner in the formulation of policy toward Iran”, and Larry Derfner of +972 Mag points out that during Barak’s tenure at the helm of the Netanyahu government’s Defense ministry, “he has probably been best known for serving as Netanyahu’s partner in the drive for an attack on Iran.”
In the weeks before his announced retirement, Barak seemed to be situating himself as the Israeli political leader far better equipped to maintain good relations with the US than Netanyahu. Isabel Kershner reported in the New York Times on Oct. 3 that a rift was growing between Barak and Netanyahu, citing Shmuel Sandler, a politics and foreign policy expert at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University (and at one time my next door neighbor). With the Israel elections coming, Sandler suggested that Barak wants to separate himself from Netanyahu. “What is his claim to fame? That he has good relations with Washington,” said Sandler to the Times.
If so, this raises interesting questions about Panetta’s presentation of a Distinguished Service medal to Barak three days after his announced withdrawal from politics. It certainly bolsters Barak’s pro-American image, but was the award presentation planned before Panetta knew Barak would be retiring? Is it an American plea for Barak not to leave the Israeli political scene? Or is it a harbinger that Barak will maintain his close ties with the Obama administration — and perhaps forge evens stronger ties — once he is unencumbered by his role as an Israeli politician?
]]>Okay, it seems I spoke too soon. Hamas is now back in the “Iranian-supported” camp according to this editorial in the New York Times, which identifies Hamas as both “backed by Iran” and pathologically “consumed with hatred for Israel.”
President Shimon Peres has also refocused on Iran, as [...]]]>
Okay, it seems I spoke too soon. Hamas is now back in the “Iranian-supported” camp according to this editorial in the New York Times, which identifies Hamas as both “backed by Iran” and pathologically “consumed with hatred for Israel.”
President Shimon Peres has also refocused on Iran, as shown by his response to a prompt by Piers Morgan of CNN. Morgan doesn’t beat around the bush and without displaying a modicum of impartiality asks: “If you believe Mr. President, that Iran is behind a lot of the Hamas terror activity, as you put it, then what action do you intend to take against Iran?”
Peres’ response?
Not that I guess so, I know that is the case. And we are not going to make a war with Iran but we are trying to prevent the shipping of long range missiles which Iran is sending to Hamas. And they are urge to Hamas to fire ….Iran is a problem, world problem. Not only from the point of view of building a nuclear danger, but also from the point of being a center of world terror. They finance, they train, they send arms, they urge, no responsibility, nor any moral consideration. It’s a world problem and you know it.
And what of the closure of the Hamas headquarters in Damascus, which according to many commentators supposedly created enormous strains with Iran and resulted in much less funding and material to Hamas than in the past? What of the recent visits by high profile non-Iranian regional leaders? Not much.
The Gaza problem, in the minds of the Netenyahu-Barak duo, is caused by Iran, according to Salam Masalha, writing in Haaretz: “[t]he current operation can be called “the little southern Iranian operation,” since it’s designed to paralyze Iran’s southern wing. The next operation will be “the little northern Iranian operation “: It will try to destroy Iran’s Lebanon wing.”
Israeli officials must be feeling like they’re losing their public relations war on Gaza. The meme of Hamas, the terrorist group, no longer seems sufficient. Hence “Hamas, the terrorist group supported by Iran” comes to the rescue.
Even the New York Times is noticing this problem and wants the “Arab leaders to speak the truth and stop ignoring the culpability of Hamas.” The unhappiness with the changed region and the difficulty it poses for the usual conceptualization of the disproportionate Israeli attacks on Gaza as self-defense and a fight against terrorism, is palpable. After all, it is not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is calling Israel a “terrorist state” these days, but Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
The reality is that even the re-attachment of Hamas to Iran will neither resolve Israel’s occupation problem nor its public relations predicament. Israel is deemed the aggressor and out of control in the region not because it is unable to tell and re-tell its anti-terrorism narrative loudly enough, but because it cannot convince most of the world that its reckless bombing of a civilian population is a fight against terrorism (and its presumed chief sponsor, Iran).
As Sherine Tadros points out in her discussion of why reporting on Gaza is hard: “Hamas is not Gaza.” The reason Israel, after a few days of bombing, invariably loses its ability to sell the Iranian-backed terrorism meme in the court of regional public opinion — although not to US policy-makers who are its chief concern — is because most people know that no society and its livelihood can be reduced to its government, no matter how bad that government is.
To be sure, the current Israeli government can take the honest route and call for the punishing of the entire society in the way Gilad Sharon, son of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, did when he said that “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza… The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.”
But this is not the route most Israeli leaders (excepting Interior Minister Eli Yishai who posited the goal of Pillar of Defense Operation as “sending Gaza back to the Middle Ages”) have taken. The route taken is to say that Israel had no choice but to respond disproportionately because of Hamas terrorism (now, again, supported by outside terrorists).
This is not a credible argument given the impact of Israeli actions — including the almost 6-year old embargo — on Gaza and not Hamas. And blaming or even militarily attacking Iran will not make Gaza go away.
- Farideh Farhi is an independent researcher and an affiliate graduate faculty member in political science and international relations at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.
]]>Four years ago, there was some hope in Washington that J Street, the self-proclaimed “pro-Israel, pro-peace” Jewish lobbying group, could someday provide a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
No one expected J Street to seriously challenge AIPAC after just four years. But the organization’s track record to date [...]]]>
Four years ago, there was some hope in Washington that J Street, the self-proclaimed “pro-Israel, pro-peace” Jewish lobbying group, could someday provide a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
No one expected J Street to seriously challenge AIPAC after just four years. But the organization’s track record to date gives some cause for concern with regard to the direction its heading in.
J Street has had some controversial missteps in its time. For example, its waffling on the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-09, and its dissembling response when it was revealed that left-wing magnate George Soros had been one of its key initial funders.
This time their investment in Peter Beinart presented a hurdle for them. Beinart published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for what he regrettably termed “Zionist BDS,” which is simply a new name for a policy long advocated by left-wing groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and more center-left groups like Americans for Peace Now. It basically advocates for the boycott of settlement products, services and venues.
Just a few days before Beinart appeared as one of the key figures at their conference, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami gave an interview to Iran/Israel hawk Jeffrey Goldberg where he strongly criticized Beinart’s stance. The result, which became apparent when the issue came up during one of the plenaries, was to split the conference audience over the issue.
This was not the only controversial event. J Street’s decision to feature former Israeli prime Minister Ehud Olmert brought criticism from Palestinian human rights groups, mostly in Gaza, who were concerned about this honor being bestowed on someone who they consider a war criminal. This also caused some problems for J Street’s ally group, B’Tselem, which works with many Palestinian human rights groups and was a participating organization in the conference.
One can argue about the pros and cons of these moves by J Street. But of greater concern is the question of whether J Street is really able to impact matters on Capitol Hill.
At AIPAC’s conference this year all the leading Republican presidential candidates (except for Ron Paul) spoke and were warmly welcomed. President Obama himself spoke to the crowd, as did his Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta. Leading members of Congress, including Mitch McConnell, Carl Levin, Nancy Pelosi, Eric Cantor and others were also featured.
For its part J Street got Anthony Blinken, who is Joe Biden’s senior foreign policy aide, and key Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, whose role has virtually no connection to Middle East policy. That might not seem so bad until you consider that Obama sent his National Security Adviser, Jim Jones, to J Street’s first conference, and Middle East point man, Dennis Ross to its last one.
There is a clear decline in Obama’s regard and concern for J Street being reflected here.
Congress is no different. Yes, there was a congressional panel at J Street’s conference. But the attendees, all Democrats, are not among those who are particularly influential on issues regarding Israel. Representatives Eddie Bernice Johnson, Barbara Lee, Jim McGovern, Chellie Pingree and David Price spoke at the conference, but will take little influence on J Street’s issues back with them to the House of Representatives.
Some have noted that J Street’s conference this year was more about connecting with Israel and establishing more firmly, in centrist eyes, its pro-Israel bona fides.
Indeed, there certainly was a more distinctly Israeli feel about this conference. The most morally clear and persuasive speaker, to my ears, was newly-elected chairwoman of the left-Zionist Meretz Party, Zehava Galon. And there were several Knesset members present, some of whom are, like Amram Mitzna, fairly prominent.
Yet in the end all the Knesset members were from either the Labor Party or Meretz. Those two parties together control only 11 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
It’s true that the Israeli embassy reversed their previous stance and sent an emissary to this year’s conference. Ehud Olmert said, and J Street contends, that this is very important and perhaps it is. But one could also see it as a calculation which concludes that J Street is not much of a threat to the Netanyahu government’s efforts in the US, and that the attempt to ostracize J Street does more to boost their position than a condescending speech like Baruch Binah’s does.
Olmert’s appearance might be considered significant as well. Yet Olmert has faded from public view in Israel because of the scandal which forced him from office three years ago. While the issue is certainly not one that is uncommon in Israeli politics, Olmert is the only Israeli Prime Minister to leave office due to such a scandal, and he is facing indictment.
Shimon Peres, who made the trip to appear at AIPAC, sent J Street a pep talk by video.
So what are the prospects for J Street’s future?
J Street has one reason to exist, and that is to change the playing field in Washington, to establish a real force that serves as another option to AIPAC and can cover elected officials who wish to support the policies that AIPAC opposes.
I’ve been to all three of their conferences, and each of the last two have felt like that goal was farther away than the one before. Polls suggest J Street represents the view of a silent majority of Jews and non-Jews, certainly among Democrats, and probably among old-time, realist-style Republicans. But it sure doesn’t seem that way from the ground or at their conferences.
Most importantly, it doesn’t look that way from Capitol Hill or Pennsylvania Avenue.
]]>- Jerusalem Post: Israeli President Shimon Peres endorsed linkage—the concept accepted by many in the Obama administration and military leadership that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help the U.S. pursue its longterm strategic objectives in the Middle East—at a conference of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute on Thursday. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Peres said that, “for our existence, we need the friendship of the United States of America,” and “…the president said Israel could be of help to the US by enabling an ‘anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East, and the contribution will not be by declaration, but if we stop the secondary conflict between us and the Palestinians,’ in order to allow the US to focus on the Iranian threat.”
- The Race For Iran: Peter Jenkins endorses Gareth Evans post which lays out why Iran’s leaders will not pursue nuclear weapons, but adds that while pressure and persuasion may help deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it may also have the opposite effect. Jenkins suggests that Western powers start focusing on addressing broader regional concerns about a nuclear weapons possession and the impact on the regional balance of power. “Now that most of the evidence points to Iran having opted for self-denial, a new policy is needed, a policy that gives priority to allaying Israeli and Arab fears that a threshold capability will enhance Iran’s regional status and self-confidence,” he concludes.
- Commentary: Evelyn Gordon writes on the Contentions blog that the incoming Congress must do everything it can to support the Iranian opposition. She says “Swiss cheese sanctions” won’t work. “That leaves two choices: a military strike, which everyone professes to oppose, or regime change — which probably wouldn’t end the nuclear program but would mitigate the threat it poses,” she writes. She says this entails “vocal and unequivocal moral support,” and “technological support.” She concludes: “What Congress must do is find out from movement organizers themselves what they need — and then give it to them.”
- The Guardian: Foreign affairs columnist Simon Tisdall writes that “neither sanctions nor diplomacy can wholly obviate the dread possibility of military confrontation unless something fundamental changes soon at the heart of Iran’s fundamentalist regime.” Tisdall points to some of the effects of sanctions, but says their overall impact inside is difficult to know, noting comments from Iran’s finance minister that the country’s cash reserves are enough to withstand the pressure. He also mentions resistance to the program from China, Turkey and Iraq. He says that while Iran is due to come to the negotiating table next month, it will likely limit the talks. “[T]here is little or no evidence so far that Iran’s top leadership is willing, or can be forced, to fundamentally change its ways,” he writes. “And so the dread juggernaut of direct, physical confrontation rolls ever closer.”